This weekend, Teatro La Fenice marks the fiftieth anniversary of ECM with a three day event reflecting relationships central to ECM’s work, between composition and improvisation, between form and freedom, in a programme that ranges from classical masterpieces by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms to fiery Italian jazz, via innovative music from Brazil and Tunisia.
Peerless Hungarian-born pianist Sir András Schiff launches the event, playing the Six Partitas BWV 825-830 of Johann Sebastian Bach. Schiff’s ECM recording of these pieces received much praise around the world, with the San Francisco Chronicle moved to declare that “András Schiff is probably the most ingenious and resourceful performer of Bach on the modern piano today.”
Schiff also appears on Day Two of this festival, as soloist in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Concerto No 4, under the baton of Korean conductor Myung Whun Chung, for many years a frequent visitor to La Fenice. Chung also conducts the Fourth Symphony of Johannes Brahms, a work singled out by Arnold Schoenberg in his famous essay “Brahms The Progressive.”
Day Three begins with the quartet of Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem. The group, which includes Swedish bass guitarist Börn Meyer, German bass clarinettist Klaus Gesing and Lebanese percussionist Khaled Yassine was formed for the album The Astounding Eyes of Rita in 2008, a recording Brahem dedicated to the memory of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. With the emphasis on low tones – bass clarinet, bass guitar, Yassine’s deep–throbbing frame drum, and the resonant wood of Brahem’s oud - the quartet’s music is often a subtle dance of dark colours.
Egberto Gismonti, born in the town of Carmo in Brazil to parents from Lebanon and Sicily, studied piano before he took up the guitar and in his unique work the two instruments seem to have influenced each other. As he puts it, “my musical thought, as a soloist on two contradictory instruments is in a process of becoming a unified thing.” Gismonti has been an ECM recording artist since 1976, his debut for the label, Dança das Cabeças.
Enrico Rava, who first recorded for ECM in 1975 with The Pilgrim And The Stars is arguably the most influential figure in the history of Italian jazz and his groups have become effectively training schools for gifted young musicians. Pianist Giovanni Guidi and trombonist Gianluca Petrella, now major players and bandleaders in their own right, rejoin mentor Rava for this concert in the great trumpeter’s 80th year.
Teatro la Fenice is an apt location for a celebration of ECM. In recent years the opera house has twice been the setting for ECM recordings: Keith Jarrett’s spontaneously-improvised recital “La Fenice” , and Myung Whun Chung’s solo piano album with music of Debussy, Chopin, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Schuman and Mozart, which was praised by the BBC Music Magazine for its “refreshingly unconventional approach. Beauty of sound and suppleness of inflection abound.”
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